While Langston Hughes is typically read as a staunch supporter of solidarity defined by descent, I suggest that his 1961 poem Ask Your Mama pursues a form of sociality that privileges race but is not exclusively determined by it, instead exploring possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange. As the negotiation of alterity and the reexamination of inherited attachments—cultural, racial, or national—cosmopolitanism is a crucial although understudied radical strain of thought in this moment, and one we can hear sounded in Hughes’s jazz poem. Hughes’s column for the Chicago Defender displays traces of a cosmopolitan ethos leading up to the composition of Ask Your Mama, traces that coincide with the transnational values inspired by jazz’s increasingly international circulation. Drawing on the surge in music’s postwar commercial and state-sanctioned circulation, Hughes’s poem becomes a unification of his own impulse to expand affiliations across national and ethno-racial lines and the discourses around jazz and other vernacular music. Ask Your Mama combines generic forms and overlays scales of exchange that exceed any neatly defined geographic origin or cultural category. Analyzing these combinations of poetry and music, I show how networks of alternative meanings are produced that reconfigure relations between geographic distance, community, and identity, the comingling of disparate cultures and national affiliations formalized in the interstices of music and poetic verse. Ultimately, Hughes demonstrates how, amid the overlapping seizures and resignifications of black cultural production at mid-century, jazz music could be reclaimed and repurposed to transform poetry’s structure and rearticulate the boundaries of ethno-racial solidarity.

中文翻译：

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“边界绑定解除”：兰斯顿休斯问你妈妈边缘的爵士乐和冷战世界主义

虽然兰斯顿休斯通常被解读为由血统定义的团结的坚定支持者，但我建议他 1961 年的诗《问你妈妈》追求一种赋予种族特权但并非完全由种族决定的社会形式，而是探索世界性交流的可能性。作为对异质性的谈判和对继承的依恋——文化、种族或民族的重新审视——世界主义是一种至关重要的激进思想，但目前尚未得到充分研究，我们可以在休斯的爵士诗中听到这种思想。休斯为芝加哥卫士撰写的专栏展示了导致《问你妈妈》的创作的国际化精神的痕迹，这些痕迹与爵士乐日益国际化的传播所激发的跨国价值观相吻合。借助战后音乐在商业和国家批准的流通中的激增，休斯的诗成为了他自己的冲动的统一，即他扩大了跨越民族和民族种族的联系以及围绕爵士乐和其他白话音乐的话语。Ask Your Mama 结合了通用形式和重叠的交流规模，超出了任何明确定义的地理起源或文化类别。通过分析诗歌和音乐的这些组合，我展示了如何产生替代意义的网络，这些网络重新配置了地理距离、社区和身份之间的关系，不同文化的融合以及在音乐和诗歌的间隙中形式化的国家归属。最终，休斯展示了在本世纪中叶黑人文化生产的重叠扣押和重新定义中，